Best media players for Linux - A choice selection

Do you love music and videos, but don't know where to start. Let me help you. This article reviews several most popular and useful media players for Linux, including Gnome and KDE desktops, covering ease of use, codecs, lyrics, subtitles, streaming, and more.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/media-players.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

I personally like VLC Player. It will play nearly anything.

 

Smplayer or VLC for video
Clementine or Banshee for audio

 

Mrkvonic
As a comparative newcomer to Linux I rely very much on your critiques. Currently dual booting Linux Mint Julia (the only one I can get my head around) with Vista Ultimate.

I have often looked at the multitude of media player choices on Mint, tried most of them but never been able to say which I prefer. This article has come at the perfect time for me and I find it enormously enjoyable. Keep 'em coming, your opinions and guidance are so very valuable and important to we many who would love to know more, but don't!!! (But we do keep trying!!).

 

I mainly use mplayer for video.
audacious is a great lightweight but powerful app for playing music.
I like to use separate apps for tasks rather than the ones that do it all.

 

I'm a huge fan of MPD with Sonata as a frontend.

For movies I'm currently using Mplayer.

 

Mrkvonic's site is a great resource for Linux new and seasoned users.
I'd love to see him do a bi-weekly video podcast. There are so few great podcasts for Linux without all the fanboy celebrating and distro bashing.

 

Video - oh oh, that's ambitious. Maybe one day ...
Mrk

 

Nice selection of apps in this review.
Like Apathy, I prefer SMPlayer as an MPlayer front-end (unbeatable and even preferred over VLC in my case/imao).

Amarok, aaargh, THE music player for Linux but 1.4->2.0....just not my cup of tea coffee.
Hopefully a frontend like SMPlayer will be build one day so I can return using it.
In the meantime Clementine is a great off-spin though and my preferred music player.

 

Please.....don't feed Mrk's ego. It must be presently the size of Everest.

I'm sure he already sees himself as the Elton John of linux.

.

Later...

 

This.

 

what about a streaming radio player? i've been using Screamer in windows and trying to find something similar...

 

I use VLC in Windows and Linux. Haven't found anything it can't play yet.

 

i like VLC player as my 1st option you dont even need to tweak it

its play everything by default and very smoothly second i like mplayer after little tweaking its as powerful as vlc i agree with mrk they both are very powerful and whole some suites rather than just a video player

 

Recently I assembled an Intel Atom based music server (running VortexBox) with room for about 3000 CD's in flac format. I'm still in the process of ripping all my CD's and tagging them, this is a very time consuming project. Vortexbox comes with an automatic ripper built-in, but I prefer dBpoweramp, because of it's AccurateRip feature. dBpoweramp finds album art automagically. I also aim for better control of the folder structure in the music storage.

Anyway, Sometimes I merge tracks and I need to retag tracks and renumber and rename CD's. For that I use Foobar2000, which works amazingly fast over the network.
I haven't had the guts yet to research which linux application would be as easy with tagging as Foobar2000.
And then, yes, it would be great to have an application on my desktop that accesses the music database and streams albums to me.

Anyone who is interested in high quality audio from your laptop/dekstop, I want to add the suggestion to research for a USB-DAC. For $100-$200 you get amazing sound improvement compared to your regular soundcard!

 

hello wilbernl.

I know this is the linux-subforum and all, but I just wanted to recommend Exact Audio Ripper. It includes AccurateRip too, and is one of the best audio ripper I can think of, offering to make an .IMG-, .mp3- or .flac-file.
Unfortunately, it's only free as in beer and windows only, but it runs perfectly through Wine.

 

RubyRipper is a native Linux ripper that has a secure-rip feature (similar to EAC on Windows). RubyRipper is endorsed by the boys at Hydrogen Audio and a lot of people at What.cd use it.

I am sure that in 2011 there are apps for Linux that do what you want. I have never really needed high-speed tagging, but when I do tag I use Kid3.

Sure but you also need a nice set of monitors and a good sub.

 

Thank you very much, Chronomatic, that seems to function similar to ripit, which can be setup to launch automatically when an audio CD is in the drive. But these apps miss AccurateRip functionality. EAC, Ripit and RubyRipper are great applications, though.

I have my Atom based linux music server sitting in the living room and the audio is put into an usb-dac. I started with selecting the Klipsch F1 speakers and these speakers are sensitive enough that a low power class-T amp (like the Dayton DTA-1) will drive them fine. The volume dial doesn't get any higher than 10 o'clock, it's very loud.

Anyway, even a nice headphone set will sound marvelous with an usb-dac.
I have no doubt that we have forum members who are interested in audio quality higher than from PC speakers and I hope that my response doesn't go too far from the topic.

 

I dunno about RubyRipper, but doesn't EAC have the "AccurateRip" functionality built in? When I used to rip a lot of flacs in the past, I remember EAC comparing the results to a database online. They almost always passed with a 100% rating.

And EAC is the preferred Windows ripper on What.cd (the largest music torrent site). Those guys there have extremely strict rules for how flacs have to be ripped or they wont accept them. I mention EAC because it works perfectly on Linux under WINE.

I have a 10 year old set of Boston Accoustic speakers and a sub-woofer. I have been pleased with them so much that I have never felt the need to get a newer set. They still sound great after 10 years (and I am using a standard Intel HDA onboard soundcard). Of course, I am only using 2.1 stereo sound (no surround here).